The horrors of Gaza have resumed with over 200 Palestinians killed already in the tiny, physically battered, enclave surrounded by Israeli forces on land, air and sea. Israeli Defence Minister and former army war hero Yoav Gallant openly voices a policy of massive assaults right across the Gaza Strip in the coming weeks.
Christians the world over, thus, have begun their Christmas season of celebrating the birth of faith founder Jesus Christ and commemorating the sacred, historical ‘Nativity’, in a ‘Holy Land’ of Palestine devastated by war, ethnic cleansing and creeping famine. Indeed, the city of Bethlehem, usually by now beginning to teem with tourists and pilgrims, has actually cancelled its Christmas celebrations.
Bethlehem is largely an Arab Palestinian city comprising a mix of Christian Arabs, Muslim Arabs and smaller groups like the Samaritans, Druze. But the entire West Bank, in which Bethlehem is located, is currently suffering under intensive Israeli counter insurgency operations as well as anti-Arab violence by the Israeli mobs from the many illegal Israeli settlements.
All this is vividly shown to the whole world in a manner that is incomparably greater and more effective than in the early 2000s and before, thanks to social media and the greatly expanded news industry of the Global South. Even if Western mainstream news media hides much of the cruelty of the Israeli Occupation of Palestine, even western society benefits from streams of social media for a window into the horrors ongoing. And these horrors are so spectacular and extreme. Worse, the political pronouncements of Israeli leaders are so extremely racist and arrogant that, in combination with the visuals of devastation and suffering, even Western citizens are learning much more than what their own politicians would want them to know.
Hence, the increasing spontaneous reactions against the war on Palestine not only in the Global South – such as in Sri Lanka – but also in the rich societies of the dominant Western bloc. In fact some of the mass protests in the First World are as big as those in large Global South countries.
Israeli Defence Minister Gallant is seen as a future contender for the right-wing Likud governing party leadership and a possible future Prime Minister. Himself, the son of a war hero of the European Jewish illegal military campaigns of 1946-48 that created the new Israeli state in the then British colony of Palestine, Gallant is seen as taking a brutish militaristic line against the Palestinians in order to build voter popularity. He infamously called the Gazan people ‘human animals’ in the aftermath of the October 7 Hamas attack.
Opinion polls in Israel consistently show that Israeli voters are more hawkish than Benjamin ‘Bibi’ Netanyahu who is now largely seen as opportunistic and corrupt rather than genuinely patriotic. The bulk of Israelis want a hegemonistic, Jewish exclusive, Greater Israel and no Palestine at all. An average of 70 percent of Israelis support the war. Some opinion polls taken since the October 7 Hamas attack, show even higher percentages favouring war.
Secularist and peacenik Israeli Jews are a tiny minority. Scores of thousands of secular-liberal Jews have actually emigrated out of Israel in the past few years because of their dislike of the new authoritarian and religious-fundamentalist laws being enacted and their realisation that this political system only engenders insecurity rather than stability.
However, the Government’s active Jewish inward migration program successfully offsets the population drain. The Zionist priority is to ensure electoral and demographic dominance of Jews over Arabs.
Hardline politicians
To many Israeli hardline politicians, these voter opinions are their lifeline to future electoral success. Such are the dynamics of competitive, multi-party democracy. Adolf Hitler also came to power the same way – a wave of German insecurity arising from their defeat in World War I and the poverty of the Great Depression.
Benny Gantz is another ex-Army General now in politics with an eye on Israeli premiership. He is as hawkish as Gallant. Elsewhere, too, this political numbers game is being played out in relation to the war in Palestine.
Some political analysts in the US are puzzled by the persistence of President Joe Biden’s and his Democratic Party’s unconditional support for Israel’s cruel and destructive response to the Hamas attack. While the Republican Party has long taken a hawkish stance of protecting Israel at all costs, the Democratic Party had been known for its favouring of a more balanced treatment of Israel and Palestine.
However, in recent decades, the American electoral map has changed, especially due to the ‘gerrymandering’ or adjustment of electorates within states to favour this or that state ruling party. Since the state Republican administrations have been the most aggressive in shaping electorate vote banks in its favour, today the Democratic Party is hemmed in by strong pro-Republican voter blocs that can easily tip electoral outcomes against it. This was seen when it came to counting Electoral College votes in the 2016 Presidential Elections when Donald Trump took more Electoral College votes despite Democratic contender Hillary Clinton who easily won the actual popular vote count.
Hence, the need of the Democrats to not only retain their party loyalists but also to capture some Republican votes as well. This is seen as crucial in the ‘Swing’ States where the vote could shift either way.
Liberal analysts
Today, although some liberal analysts are puzzled by the risk Biden seems to take in alienating voters by uncritical support for Israel, there is also the perception among analysts that the Democrats are confident that come 2024, the pro-Democratic vote banks would return to the fold. This is because, despite their dislike of Biden, such voters would never vote for such an obnoxious candidate as Trump. Likewise, Democratic candidates must lean rightwards to catch those many Republicans who just do not want to vote for Trump again.
As the war has progressed, most Western citizens have begun to feel less threatened by Palestine. This is due to a combination of Israeli hyperbole on the October 7 Hamas attack alongside the obvious enormous military imbalance between the Western-supported Israel on the one hand, and, the virtually ‘barefoot’ Palestine militant movements and Palestinian civilian protestors on the other.
After all, neither Hamas nor any other Palestinian or Arab or Muslim group within Palestine or in neighbouring Arab states pose even the remotest threat to the Israeli Defence Forces (IDf), one of the world’s most powerful militaries – even without factoring in the 100-plus nuclear warheads it possesses.
Most significantly, the global news media, together with the even more ubiquitous social media, has helped the global public gain comprehensive views of the war itself.
The global public is realising how puny the Palestinian resistance is in comparison with Israeli military might, ‘Iron Dome’, Merkava battle tanks, armoured bulldozers, ‘microbot’ spy drones and all.
So come Christmas, the Holy Land of world Christianity is a horrific contrast to what is normally commemorated – a time of wondrous Nativity and joyous heralding of peace to all humanity. Instead of fantasy scenes of a Babe in swaddling clothes in a quiet manger surrounded by life, the world is forced to watch Gazan babes being born without any clean rags or any water and amid the terrifying thunder of explosives.
Heat of battle
Thousands of babies are actually dying in the heat of battle. So are their mothers, and whole families as entire city blocks or refugee encampments are obliterated by high explosives. It is not the mooing of cows and bleating of sheep that echo in the manger. Far from it.
In an even more poignant theological contrast, rather than the Nativity, what is being enacted in Palestine today is yet another David-and-Goliath battle. The real ‘Israelites’ are the indigenous Palestinians, exactly that indigenous Canaanite population that was Yahweh’s ‘Chosen People’. And the Iron Dome, the Merkava tanks and bullet-proof clad troopers of the IDF are the aggressor Philistines (Goliath’s people) – so similar to the ancient Sea People invaders from the West who conquered the Canaan coastline.
People of the world may certainly wish each other a ‘Happy Christmas’ but they must do so with a moving, heartfelt commemoration of a violated, un-holy land that is the Chist’s birthplace today. The Hope of Peace that is Christmas is immediate, now, for real people we are seeing daily, nightly, in immensely violent suffering. Yahweh, the Divine, always chooses the suffering to save.
